Normal People Things

The discomfort here isn't performed — it lives in the texture of the guitars, choppy and slightly uncomfortable, like a conversation you're trying to exit gracefully but can't find the door. Lovejoy captures something specific and difficult to articulate: the experience of watching other people exist easily in social spaces while you're running a constant background process of calculation and mimicry just to approximate normalcy. The rhythm section keeps things moving with a brisk, almost impatient momentum, as if even the song wants to get through this social obligation and go home. Soot's vocal delivery is particularly sharp here — the tone is observational and slightly comic, but the comedy is the defensive kind, born from genuine unease rather than detachment. There's no resolution offered, no reassurance that it gets easier; the song is content to simply describe the feeling with precision, and that accuracy is its own strange comfort. It fits neatly into the post-punk revival's more introspective corner, somewhere adjacent to early Blur or pre-stadium Wombats, music made by people who find social performance genuinely taxing. It's the song for the car ride home after a party where you smiled too much and said too little — when the performance is finally over and you can let your face do whatever it actually wants.